WifiNigel

In the Wi-Fi For Beginners podcast, I've spent a lot of time talking about WLAN clients . Understanding their characteristics, capabilities and behavior is crucial when designing and deploying a wireless LAN. Without understanding the clients on your network, you will not be able to anticipate their demands on your WLAN infrastructure and the level of performance that you will be able to realistically be able to provide to end users . The discussion about WLAN clients is fairly extensive and spans a number of episodes as this is such an important topic. In the podcast I highlight the importance of understanding the capabilities of the clients that connect to a WLAN. Just because you buy yourself a nice new shiny smartphone that (you hope) supports 802.11ac, doesn't mean you are going to get 1.3Gbps of throughput when you hook it up to your Wi-Fi network. Unless you understand its capabilities in terms of 802.11 amendment support, number of streams available etc., then you

I recently attended the Ekahau Certified Survey Engineer (ECSE) training course, presented by Keith Parsons. In addition to learning about using Ekahau Site Survey  (ESS), Keith also shared some valuable insights in to best practice wireless LAN design and surveying techniques. One of these insights was a best practice approach to measuring loss through obstructions and attenuation areas, such as doors, walls and warehouse racking, when gathering data for a WLAN predictive model.  In this article, I’ll share the details of that approach and some mistakes you might be making in your own measuring approach. Please visit the Ekahau blog site to see my guest posting for the full details on this topic.

A quick post about an interesting question on Twitter about disabling indicator LEDs on Cisco APs: There are often times when a customer would like the LEDs disabled on Cisco APs. Examples include education and healthcare environments when the LEDs may be perceived as being annoying or distracting if left illuminated. The LED may be disabled by two methods: CLI :  config ap led-state disable <ap name> WLC GUI (AireOs): Wireless > All APs > [Select AP] > Advanced > Led State (see screen-shot below) Fig. Disable AP LED from WLC GUI However, once the AP indicator LED has been disabled, does it remain disabled at all times? I setup this up in my lab and did a quick test with an AP3600 running 7.6.130.0 code on the WLC. I tested 4 scenarios to see if the AP lamps remains extinguished, or would become illuminated. Here are the results: Normal operation: LED off AP lost contact with the WLC: LED off AP power cycled: Flashing LED during boot seq